Thanks Kathy

Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus’ 2011 budget was increased $129,200 by the county board Tuesday to account for the state Supreme Court election recount cost.

“I think you may remember, we’ve been through a recount in Waukesha County and the entire state of Wisconsin and the consequences of that are you need to pay for these things,” said Supervisor Duane Paulson, chairman of the personnel committee. “It was always anticipated that there was a possibility of some legal action and there was a lot of things done to document every single incident to prepare us so we would not be on the losing side of any type of legal action.”

The board approved the budget modification by an 18-3 vote with supervisors Ted Rolfs, Thomas Schellinger and Fritz Ruf voting against it.

“I didn’t believe there was enough recourse from the clerk’s office back to the county for this mistake, which could have been avoided,” Rolfs said. “Had some simple procedures been in place, we would not have had to spend all this money.”

The county will transfer the funds from its contingency fund to the clerk’s budget.

More than 14,000 votes in Brookfield were omitted from the April 5 election night report, which when they were counted gave Justice David Prosser the victory by about 7,000 votes. His opponent, JoAnne Kloppenburg, requested the taxpayer-funded recount days later, which took 21 days in Waukesha County to complete. In the end, Kloppenburg gained 312 votes and she conceded the race May 31.

The temptation would be to stick part of the blame for this fiasco with Joanne Kloppenburg. After all, no reasonable human being believed she won the election after Nickolaus’ error was discovered. However, it’s highly unlikely that Kloppenburg would have had the excuse to put the entire state through the recount if Nickolaus hadn’t screwed up.